Number of words: 528

Throughout the period of British rule, India’s North-East Frontier, the province of Assam bordering on Tibet and Burma, was regarded by those who served there as the forgotten frontier. It was known for its tea gardens and for very little else. In 1865 one of India’s leading newspapers summed up the conventional view of the province as a wild country inhabited by ‘savage tribes, whose bloody raids and thieving forays threatened serious danger to the cause of tea’. For all its exotic hill-tribes, jungles and teeming wildlife, Assam could never hope to match that other – far more glamorous – frontier province on the other side of India, the North-West Frontier. A distinguished Governor-General pronounced it to be a bore.       

Until the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1824 this beautiful and fertile corner of the subcontinent had been ignored by the East India Company and allowed to lie profitless in impenetrable jungle’. So it might have remained but for the expansionist policies of the Burmese royal house of Ava, which were very similar to those employed by the Nepalese a quarter of a century earlier. Had they contented themselves with invading Assam the Company would not have been greatly alarmed, but by pushing into Cachar and East Bengal the Burmese forced the issue. The conflict that followed has some claims to being the worst managed war in British history.       

More than a third of the British troops lost their lives, in most cases dying not from wounds but from dysentery and jungle fever. While the main thrust of the British advance on Burma was from the south, along the coast of Arakan and through the Irrawaddy delta to Rangoon, a smaller force of three thousand men was sent up the Brahmaputra river to Goalpara, which then marked the limits of British territory. From there they began to move into the Assam valley, the alluvial plain laid out by the Brahmaputra river between the Himalayan foothills to the north and a succession of lesser mountain ranges running in an arc to the south: the Patkai, Naga, Jaintia, Khasi and Garo hills (see Map B).             

The course of the Brahmaputra had long been a subject of dispute among European geographers. This river must needs have a very long course before it enters the Bengal Provinces,’ James Rennell had written in 1788, ‘since 400 miles from the sea it is twice as big as the Thames.’ He was not prepared to go along with the current popular belief, much in favour on the Continent, that the Brahmaputra’s headwaters lay south of the Himalayas and that the Tibetan Tsangpo was the same river as the Burmese Irrawaddy. There was, he believed, ‘the strongest presumptive proof possible of the Sanpoo and Burrumpooter being one and the same river.’ He was equally sure that positive proof could be obtained only by actually tracing the river all the way to its source – ‘a circumstance unlikely ever to happen to any Europeans or their depen- dants’. Two centuries later that circumstance still seems just as unlikely as it did in Rennell’s day.

Excerpted from page 98 – 99 of ‘A Mountain Tibet ’ by Charles Allen